


Memory of Distant Shores

by lea_hazel



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: Alcohol, Angst, Background Relationships, Community: femslashex, F/F, Female Friendship, Femslash, Kissing, Magic, Post-Blight, Romantic Friendship, Ultimate Sacrifice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-18
Updated: 2014-10-18
Packaged: 2018-02-21 15:34:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2473364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lea_hazel/pseuds/lea_hazel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One of the things that distinguished Darktown is that it made it very easy to spot outsiders. [...] The woman beside her was unmistakably a stranger.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Twine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [signalbeam](https://archiveofourown.org/users/signalbeam/gifts).



Darktown was forbidding; even Merrill could see that. If she looked unconcerned, if she worried her friends, it was only because she preferred to put a better face on things. Cowering in terror and hugging the walls would not make her fear go away. Certainly it wouldn't make her any safer. Playing oblivious helped calm her nerves, and in time she'd found it also made people underestimate her, a welcome side effect.

So she swung her empty shopping basket blithely as she picked her way, barefoot, between the unspeakable puddles of the undercity streets. So she smiled brightly at the vendors, if they could be called such, and ticked off her shopping list on her fingers while they watched, cross-armed and tight-mouthed. What could she possibly need with three different types of deathroot? Best not to think about it too hard. She could almost see the cogs turn in their head as they made their calculations and elected to remain silent.

Of course, she could also be caught by surprise sometimes, and that was exactly what happened on that particular day.

One of the things that distinguished Darktown is that it made it very easy to spot outsiders. Merrill herself was an obvious case. Others were less clear, but there seemed to be some sort of _quality_ that they had – or lacked – that marked them as natives of the upper world. Those who had not yet sunk as low as Kirkwall could offer. The woman beside her was unmistakably a stranger.

She was tall and slender, moon-pale and dark-haired, and wearing the most fascinating garment. Merrill had never seen its like, and found it difficult to contain her curiosity.

The woman shot her a sideways glare. Her eyes were a marvelous shade of pale gold.

“I'm sorry,” she said, “I've been staring, haven't I? I always do that. I'll stop, now.”

“See that you do,” said the stranger. “I do not enjoy being gawked at by strange elves.”

“I'm sorry,” said Merrill again, “it's only that, well, your dress.”

She huffed. “What about it?”

“Did you make it yourself?” she asked. “It's very pretty.”

The girl stared at her for a short moment before saying, “Thank you.”

She looked down and away almost conspicuously as she riffled through the skins, scrolls and ragged bits of parchment that the vendor laid out, all jumbled together indiscriminately. Whatever she was looking for was certainly none of Merrill's business, although she couldn't help but take a peek. Really, she was only here because she'd lost her scraping knife and had no reason to buy anything else.

She reached over and, with two pinched fingers, fished out a single scrap of vellum. It was faded, but probably still readable.

“Just this, then,” she said to the man behind the cart. “And the knife.”

“Sixteen coppers,” he said raspily. “You?”

The stranger's finely-drawn eyebrows snapped together. “Nothing.”

The man grunted and wheeled his creaky cart away, muttering under his breath.

“Didn't you find what you were looking for?” asked Merrill, though she knew she really shouldn't.

“This miserable warren of sewage tunnels,” the woman waved her arm expansively, “is most frustrating.”

Merrill laughed; she couldn't help herself.

“I am _so_ glad that my misfortune amuses you,” said the other irritably.

“I'm sorry,” said Merrill, who wasn't very sorry at all. “I get lost here all the time,” she added sympathetically, and pulled out the ball of twine from her pocket. “A friend of mine gave me this to help me get around. I'm going to see him right now.”

The stranger harrumphed.

“Whatever it is you're looking for,” said Merrill, “he might know where to find it. He knows things like that, sometimes.”

“Doubtful,” said the woman, arching one brow.

“Well,” she said, “at least you could get warm, and maybe get a drink.”

 


	2. Lost

It was not as though the resemblance was very great. The girl had a pale, wide-eyed, guileless face darkened by Dalish tattoos. She looked as though she had never seen the inside of a Chantry. It was odd to meet a Dalish so deep in the cities, odder still a Dalish mage. Yet her robes and staff were unmistakable. This was no ordinary runaway.

She followed her, if only to have a guide through the wild midden of twisting alleys and rickety stairs. Or so she told herself, as it quickly became clear that it would take much more than a ball of twine to keep them from getting lost – repeatedly – through the same looping corridors.

“Perhaps if you spent less time blathering and put your attention to your surroundings instead, we would not be quite so lost,” she said, after they had turned the same corner for at least the third time.

“I'm sorry,” said the elf girl, ”I know I tend to babble. I'll try to talk less.”

Morrigan peered through the gaps in the crumbling architecture. The sky was taking on a violet hue. “It is nearing dusk,” she said. “We should not dawdle.”

“Oh, I've done it again, haven't I?” said the girl. “I'm so sorry!”

“And stop apologizing all the time!” Morrigan snapped.

“I'm s–“ she stopped abruptly.

They stared at each other for a long moment.

“We should go,” said the girl eventually. “The streets here are dangerous at night, especially if you're alone. Not that they're exactly safe during the day, but at least–“

For a mercy, she cut herself off this time. “ _We_ are not alone,” said Morrigan pointedly, “and we are far from helpless.”

“That's true, I suppose,” said the girl.

“T'would perhaps be safer in a larger group,” she added reluctantly, “and possibly a large hound.”

“Oh, do you like dogs?” asked the elf. “I like dogs. There are a lot of dogs in Lowtown. Mabari hounds, because of all the Fereldan refugees. From the Blight, you know?”

She had not visited the upper city at all, merely travelling from the docks to the undercity and back again. For a moment she gave pause, before brushing off the cobwebs in the back of her mind and making a sharp turn to the left.

“Yes,” she said sharply, “of course I know about the Blight. Come here, these stairs lead down to the docks.”

“Oh!” said the other, improbably excited by this turn of events. “That's a good idea. The docks are much safer, now that no one is about at night.”

She elected not to ask how her unlikely traveling companion had gained her knowledge of the docks and their criminal nightlife. Instead she steered them both through the hazy undercity streets and out into the fresh, briny air of the docks.

They entered the first tavern they saw. In the course of her travels, Morrigan had learned not to be too picky when it came to establishments such as this. High standards were a luxury. A barmaid charged them a scandalous price for a rust-colored fluid that was surely more water than spirits. Morrigan swirled it in her cup, watching the fine residue sink to the bottom, before taking a cautious sip.

“Swill,” she said succintly, but she could feel the peculiar heat of the drink rising high in her face, dripping down to her fingertips, settling in the depths of her stomach.

“I hardly ever drink,” the elf girl confided.

“How odd,” said Morrigan. “The Dalish I have met have all been fonder of mead than was entirely wise. Did your clansmen not ply you with it from infancy, as is seemingly customary?”

“Oh,” said the other, “I suppose there was plenty of drink in the clan, and the others would drink often enough. The Keeper didn't want me joining them.”

“And you simply obeyed,” she sneered.

“At the time,” said the girl, and nothing more.

The one time she had something to say which might be of interest to Morrigan, she chose to remain silent. She was infuriating. 


	3. Disarmed

She said, “I never told you my name.”

The rusty cup begat a second, and possibly a third.

She said, “I knew a girl like you, once.”

There were some things that she chose never to speak of. There were reasons, so many reasons, why she spoke to no one, heard no one, and never gave or asked for a name.

Perhaps she said, “You never asked my name.”

To be disarmed, after all, is to be weaponless. She was a Witch of the Wilds and her mother's daughter. Candor ill suited her. She despised lies and artifice but knew the value of leaving certain things unsaid. What is given might be taken, or it might be spurned.

She said, “I kissed a girl, once.”

And the old life, with its trials and tribulations, had to be left behind. There was no use for sentimentality, not when it was dragging her down. Her quest above all, her only loyalty to the knowledge she sought. And damn the consequences.

It was the brandy speaking, no doubt.

“They will never truly understand,” she said. “You may come to rely on them, may come to care, but do not think to trust them. You can never place your trust in another. When you come to them in your hour of need, they will fail you. And you shall watch them turn their backs on you and walk away, alone.”

Another cup, and the words wound down, as though there was nothing more left to say. The silence in the darkening barroom was disrupted only by the rustle of mice creeping under the floorboards. It was not the quiet of a shared companionship where no words are necessary, but a bleary-eyed languor of exhastion. And in the raw wound that opened within that silence many things were possible. And it was harder, this time, to blame the brandy.

She didn't ask who that other girl was, or wonder who had started the kiss, and whose idea it really was. The burn of the red liquid had left her throat rasping and she remembered suddenly why she never drank. But in the closeness of the shadows it was too late to turn back and the kiss, for a mercy, staved the flow of secrets. She pushed against her warm body and stoppered her mouth like a bottle that had been knocked over, spilling, its rust-colored contents seeping dark stains into the aged wood.

She didn't ask her name.

Brandy could be denied and secrets could be forgotten, especially by the chilly pre-dawn light.

She stepped out of the dim, warm room and the dank fumes of drunken breath. Outside the sky was lightening. 


	4. Echo

They met again at the docks.

Not Kirkwall's docks, and not until years later.

It was morning, and bright sunlight streamed over the city, reflecting off the whitewashed buildings in a blinding display. The air hummed with the cries of gulls and sailors. There was no darkness, no quiet to conceal them from each other. She stood on the gangplank and knew that there was nowhere to turn, nowhere to hide. Not unless she wished to dive into the waters of Jader's harbor.

“Hello.”

Morrigan schooled her face to smoothness and forced herself to look back whence she'd come.

She was just as she had been, but different. She hardly seemed to have aged, her eyes as bright and her face as pale as they had been in the dank shadows of a barroom in Kirkwall, years ago. The sun refracted off of her bright silver mail, and she was smiling.

“I didn't expect to see _you_ here,” she said, as though they were merely acquaintances meeting at the market.

“I– well.” She scrubbed her face. “Many people find themselves in strange places, these days.”

“We live in interesting times,” said the girl. “That's what my friend says about it.”

“The friend who gave you a ball of twine?” she asked despite herself.

She smiled again. “Yes, the very same,” she said, “although I haven't seen much of him lately. Are you sailng on this ship? I think I'm sailing on this ship, too. Wouldn't it be nice, if–”

She could hardly complete her thought when a loud cry came from behind her.

“Merrill! Where have you gotten off to this time?”

The girl turned at the sound of her name, waving an arm at some figure that she couldn't pick out among the throng of humanity of the docks. A figure which then detached and began approaching them, resolving into a tall, dark-eyed woman in leather armor, followed by a large, slobbering hound. The dog bounded down the pier and Merrill bent down to pet it affectionately. The woman behind them turned to Morrigan and regarded her with something like suspicion, or perhaps merely apprehension.

“Merrill,” she said, “I don't think this is the ship to Cumberland.”

“Indeed not,” said Morrigan. “This vessel departs for Val Royeaux at noon.”

“Oh,” said Merrill, glancing back and forth between them. “That's too bad, I thought we might be able to– But never mind that, you have a ship to catch, and so do we.”

The strange woman was still watching her with interest. “Who's your friend, Merrill?”

“Oh,” she said, “no one you know. Go on to our ship, I'll find you.”

“ _Merrill_ ,” said the woman, “do you really think that's a good idea?”

She smiled brightly at the other and said, “You worry too much. Clover can stay with me, if you like. He won't let me get lost.”

The dog barked his approval.

“All right,” said the stranger, and turned slowly away.

Morrigan watched her walk down the pier, casting a look behind her every now and then.

“She likes to think she's looking out for me,” said Merrill, “but I'm hardly helpless. As you well know. We look out for each other, really.”

“How sweet,” she said drolly.

Merrill's smile dimmed, but only a fraction.

“There is precious little of value in Cumberland,” said Morrigan, almost conversationally.

“It's only a pit stop,” said Merrill. “I wish I could tell you where we're really going, but you might have guessed why we're trying to keep it quiet.”

“I see,” she said. “There are certain things I wished to avoid, as well. Alas, it seems one's past is bound to catch one unawares, sooner or later.”

“I suppose you're right,” said Merrill. “I wouldn't have stayed.”

Morrigan's attention snapped away from predicting the winds by the movement of the clouds and back to the girl who stood on the pier, watching her from wide, guileless eyes. “–What?”

“Even if you hadn't left while I was sleeping, that night,” she said patiently, “I still wouldn't have stayed. I didn't much like being told that I remind you of someone else, you know.”

“That,” said Morrigan, “is not what I meant. At all.”

Merrill shook her head vigorously. “I didn't know for certain at the time, not until years later. When I knew that it had happened to me before, I knew I wouldn't let it happen again.” Her eyes darted to the docks, to the winding figure among the throng that was visible only to her. “And I didn't.”

“I wish you all the best,” said Morrigan crisply, “with your star-crossed romance and your escape.”

“And I to you,” said Merrill, “with your haunting past.”

“I never told you my name,” she said suddenly.

Merrill smiled. “That's all right. I think I already know it.”

She whistled to the dog and they both trotted down the pier and disappeared into the crowd. And Morrigan climbed the gangplank and settled herself near the ship's prow, waiting to see which way the wind blew. 


End file.
